The top pile of a bin has an effect on the wall pressure distribution. In this paper the method of characteristics and the method of wedges have been employed to analyze wall pressure distributions of 2-D shallow bins with symmetric triangular prism-shaped piles at the top. The results show that these two methods predict very close estimations of the pressures for shallow bins. In addition, compared with the method of characteristics, the Janssen and Coulomb formulae may overestimate the pressures at small and large depths, respectively.